​Andrew Whitehead'sBlog

While walking through the Pear Tree and Normanton areas of Derby the other day, I was engrossed by the names given by some late Victorian or Edwardian property developer to fairly ordinary terraced houses. They were all 'villas' - I thought that meant something a bit more grand - and were named after places, beauty spots, statesmen ...

And then I came across 'Chillo Villa'.

I don't know what lay behind this name. There's nothing on the web to help: there's no place called Chillo - it's not a surname - the word doesn't seem to have had any particular meaning, at least not at that time (it has been used for various commercial products, all of fairly modern vintage).

So, here's a guess - that this was an echo of the Raj, perhaps named for an India-returned soldier or official ... and I wonder if the developer allowed those who were buying 'off plan' to chose the name of their villa. Perhaps this was a corruption of Chalo Villa - chalo being the much used Hindi term meaning 'let's go' and a hundred close variants. Any Raj-returned Brit of those days would know the word 'chalo' - it's almost as universal as 'namaste'.